In this blog post, we will explore how to scrape mobile web pages using the requests-html library in Python. requests-html is a powerful library that allows us to make HTTP requests, parse HTML content, and interact with web pages in a simplified manner.

What is Mobile Page Scraping?

Mobile page scraping refers to the process of extracting data from web pages specifically designed for mobile devices. With the increasing use of mobile devices, many websites have responsive designs or dedicated mobile versions. Scraping these mobile pages can give us valuable data tailored for mobile users.

Setting Up the Environment

Before we start, we need to set up our environment by installing the requests-html library. Open your terminal and type the following command:

pip install requests-html

Make sure you have Python and pip installed on your system.

Scraping a Mobile Page with Requests-HTML

Let’s dive into the code and see how to scrape a mobile page using requests-html. Start by importing the necessary modules:

from requests_html import HTMLSession

Next, create an instance of the HTMLSession class:

session = HTMLSession()

Now, let’s use the session object to make a GET request to the desired mobile page:

url = 'https://m.example.com'
response = session.get(url)

To extract specific content from the mobile page, we can use the find() method provided by requests-html. The find() method allows us to locate HTML elements based on their class name, ID, or other attributes.

For example, let’s extract all the links from the mobile page:

links = response.html.find('a')
for link in links:
    print(link.text, link.attrs['href'])

In the above code, we use 'a' as the argument for find(), which represents the anchor tag in HTML. This will return all the anchor tags present in the page. We can then iterate over the result and print the text and URL of each link.

Conclusion

Scraping mobile pages using requests-html is a straightforward process that allows us to extract data tailored for mobile users. In this blog post, we explored how to set up the environment, make a request to a mobile page, and extract specific content.

Remember to always respect the website’s terms of service and be mindful of the data you scrape. Happy mobile page scraping!